You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest, and I smile, and am silent, and even my soul remains quiet: it lives in the other world which no one owns. The peach trees blossom. The water flows. ~ Li Po (trans. Hamill) * …
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Innocent & Wild
Fugitive The supple virtue of her mind Is innocent and wild, A limber amplitude confined In elemental child. Bright stirs and quick imaginings Illuminate her way. She runs beyond terrestrial things In strange casual play. She follows paths none else would take Around important suns -- O lover, follow in her wake, For she will pass but once! ~ Theodore Roethke * …
Indefinite Appearances
The Heart-Essence & Its Play "Even though unbounded wholeness cannot be solely "this"or "that," existent or nonexistent, the bon-nature itself, "heart-essence of that definite base," is unchanging. The appearances that arise from it, however, are indefinite: they are nirvanic for the realized, samsaric for the unrealized. Indefiniteness, then, is not a statement about external objects. …
Creation & Direction
The Past What we remember of it is what we began to memorize as children, rehearsing the same scenes again and again until we got them perfect, the father, the mother, the sister entering from left and right, obeying the arrows and Xs chalked onto the stage, saying their lines precisely as we would have them said until these dramas were fixed in tableaux, enameled …
I Call His Name
Contentment Here's a poem I love, for its playful lyricism as well as its deep wisdom: how the body-mind registers contentment most fully in contrast with presumed absence or loss. It's the fish plucked out of water for a time that, upon its return, sings the praises of water, as his or her fish-comrades swimmingly wonder: what's the big deal, really? Lost Dog It’s just getting dark, fog …
Whatever Is
Ghazal V The drop dies in the river of its joy pain goes so far it cures itself in the spring after the heavy rain the cloud disappears that was nothing but tears in the spring the mirror turns green holding a miracle Change the shining wind the rose led us to our eyes let whatever is be open ~ Ghalib (trans. W.S. Merwin) * …